Athens became the capital of , the clearing-house of religions and moral ideas, whatever their source. - E. B. Osborn

There is no greater literary sin than the omission of an Index, and, if I had my way, even novels would be provided with charts of this kind to their multifarious contents—how convenient it wold be for readers, as well as reviewers, to have such a handy means of checking the emotions of 's quick-change heroines and the involved relationships, business and otherwise, or Mr. Galsworthy's , who increase in number and variety with each successive installment of his epic of property!

... the discoveries, rich and romantic and utterly unexpected as they were, have given the North-West a world-wide advertisement of inestimable value. And this is an age of advertisement.
Public opinion about such discoveries always passes through two stages—a period of universal credulity, followed by a period of universal incredulity.

In an age when the worst of sinners implicitly accepted the teaching of the , what we now regard as "honest doubt" was universally looked on as a sort of leprosy of the soul, a monstrous and highly infectious plague. The heretic was a germ-carrier to be ruthlessly routed out; the more virtuous his life, the more conspicuous his zeal for truth-seeking, the greater the danger of his example to the community. So the philosopher, who was not a theological first and last was apt to fall into bad odor with the conservative churchmen such as , who distrusted the study of logic and protested against any attempt to understand the mysteries of the Faith. , however, who was afterwards , thought that heresy must be fought by its own weapons, and he sought with much success the "necessary reasons" underlying the tenets of the Church concerning the nature of and His relations with his creatures.